Eurozone government bond yields yesterday held close to recent one-month lows as a global stock market dip led by US tech giant Amazon.com Inc sparked interest in safe-haven assets.
High-grade eurozone bonds were in demand, while southern European debt yields rose a touch ahead of the release of manufacturing surveys from the four largest eurozone economies.
Investors often sell bonds at the start of April as quarter-end demand unwinds, but most eurozone yields yesterday fell in early trade before trading flat as the session wore on.
“The big question is how far the current tremor in the equity market will affect bonds given it is driven by a single company — even if it is a tech giant having a huge market weight,” DZ Bank AG strategist Christian Lenk said.
Shares of Amazon on Monday fell 6 percent after US President Donald Trump attacked the online retailer over the pricing of its deliveries through the US Postal Service and promised unspecified changes.
That affected global stocks, in turn fueling bids for safer assets and 10-year US Treasury yields dropped to a near two-month low of 2.71 percent on Monday.
Yesterday, German 10-year government bond yields briefly dropped to 0.48 percent, close to a two-and-half-month low of 0.473 percent hit last week.
While economic news in the single-currency bloc has continued to be positive this year, it is no longer surprising on the upside as it was through last year.
So, any failure to meet expectations could drive further interest in bonds as investors ratchet back expectations for rate hikes from the European Central Bank.
“It will be interesting to see which way the data goes ahead of eurozone inflation numbers tomorrow [today],” Lenk said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day